Downtown diatribe

I’m going to take a bit of a break from vegetarian blogging this week to moan about something different that has really gotten me steamed. I have had it with downtown restaurants and their lackadaisical approach to service. They seem to be operating under the assumption that we working stiffs have all the time in the world for our lunch breaks, instead of just an hour. We’re not all executives who can kick back for a leisurely two-hour lunch. It’s kind of ridiculous that it’s generally faster to get in the car and drive to someplace on Stratford Road for lunch instead of walking a block and a half to a downtown restaurant.

If we wanted to limit ourselves to places where you go through a cafeteria-type line or order at a counter and pick up your food to go, we would be OK. (We love the reliably speedy Downtown Deli for this.) But sometimes we want to actually sit at a table and be waited on, and that has gotten to be next to impossible to accomplish in an hour downtown. Downtown Thai seems to be about the only place that can be counted on to get you in and out in an hour, and they’ve raised their lunch price to a rather ridiculous level that’s just too much for journalists’ wallets. Xia also has a nice sense of service—if you get the right waiter. If you get the wrong one, you can be in trouble.

Hutch and Harris has been hit-and-miss for us in several previous visits (more toward the miss side, but with enough hits to keep us hanging on and hoping), but this week was a deal-breaking miss. The waitress told us she’d be right back after bringing us our drinks. She then proceeded to take another table’s order and put together the bill for another table—reasonable enough, since they were there first. But then she wandered around the dining room, chatted with another waitress, and hung out aimlessly at the bar, as if she had completely forgotten we were sitting there, waiting. It was so vexing we ended up leaving.

6th and Vine teeters on the edge of being too slow, but they’re fast enough to stay in our lunch rotation, even with a bit of a longish walk to get there. Cat’s Corner is notoriously slow, and even the fact that it takes only about a minute to get there from the Journal office can’t remotely compensate. We sat at a table for five minutes today without anyone bringing menus or even acknowledging our presence. We’ve learned that it’s completely impossible to get reasonably fast service at Foothills Brewery and Finnigan’s Wake, much as we like their food. Foothills is particularly glacially slow, reaching the level of farce—even if only three tables have people at them and there are multiple waitpeople, it could still take you an hour just to get your food.

Does anyone else have this problem with downtown restaurants (or restaurants in general) when you’re trying to have lunch? Does it bug you as much as it does us?

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